Disease

In many ways, I still find it easier to describe the sickness than to prescribe a cure. And, I must confess, I am hopeless as I dictate hope. The hypocritical. The doctors get sick themselves, at least. I do not think myself some omnipotent God, pretending to know everything. I simply want my voice to count. To hit you. I don't know how else I will live. I don't know what I want for my life, just that it helps someone else. I do not really care about a job, I want to influence change. I'm sorry if that sounds irresponsible but it is painfully true. I do not want money, I can live without love, but I will not go without leaving a fingerprint. I don't know how to keep hoping for something so malleable.

The way your skies fade to the most medium shade of gray. Smiles lose their potency. Your teeth feel sticky sweet, you can't chew on life anymore. The cavities invade your body. It feels as if the world is filled with bright lights, but you have blind eyes. You're missing something.

But you're not alone. There are others, perhaps thousands of us with the same condition. Draw upon my mistakes. The moments where I drowned myself with a blanket, slicing my wrists to nothingness. My shoulder is always present, my ear ever pressed to the ground for some sign, some rumble, an echo that someone out there is hurting, and is coming. Walking, running, crawling to come and share their pain with me. To laugh and cry, to be heavy, burdened human beings crying out of our pores the sadness of our souls. To let every surface be coated in the thick, molasses love we feel for those who have suffered like us. Imagine, if you will, a golden, honey substance saturating everything in the room. It coats your lips, seeps from your shirt. The cracks between ceiling and wall are oozing it. It permeates every surface, fills the room like a flood. It's crashing down everything, pushing aside all of your garbage, pushing invisible walls out of the way. Stones fall from air, their cloaks knocked off. This is the love I feel for you. It fills everything. It consumes me. Still, this love, is nothing to the one who made you. He feels ten thousand of these rooms, floods the streets with the molten, sticky sweet sunshine. My love coats your lips and fills your lungs, His is so huge it runs out of your pores.

Someone out there will not believe me, but do you always feel the love your mother feels for you? No. Can you always see the way your father cries when you are hurt? No. It is in the secret, purple moments that no one likes to see that these are readily noticeable. For myself, I know that my family loves me, but there are those orange glowing moments in fields of wheat where I feel it. It soaks into me. Where I walk downstairs disheveled in the morning, and someone says "Hey cutie." When I walk down the street and the same man walks past me, a year apart, and says I am beautiful. First time, shyly, I wring a smile from my face "You have a beautiful smile." The next, when the smile readily beams "You are beautiful." Is it for me he says this? Is it for himself? When we help others through our pain, our insecurity, when we take the focus off of ourselves and our own pain, even if we can only do it for a minute or two, we are truly helped. Something about the look in someone's eye from one simple phrase, makes us forget our ugliness. It cracks the mask of monstrosity, and reveals the wholly perfect being underneath with the new, blue skin without lines on it from age and erosion.

When you teach a man, you are the one learning. I'm not saying to do it all the time, to give that much is exhausting, but for the few lucid moments you have to yourself, give them away. The sunshine that radiates from a being because of your words will come in handy in those woolen, itchy moments when you only see your flaws. When you remember what you have done for someone, you can fight back those lies that say you are worthless.